[FFmpeg-devel] Democratization work in progress draft v2

[Leo Izen]

On 1/31/25 11:01 AM, Soft Works wrote:
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
>> James Almer
>> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2025 4:45 PM
>> To: ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org
>> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] Democratization work in progress draft v2
>>
>>> Past involvement, including long-past involvement, is not only
>> past, it
>>> is both indication of knowledge about the project and prediction of
>>> future involvement.
>>>
>>> For that reason, I believe that if this plan goes forward, it
>> should
>>> include all past involvement, but possibly with the condition that
>> the
>>> involvement continues presently.
> 
> How about a quadratic attenuation of past commit counts, so that older commits count less than more recent ones?
> 

Such quadratic metrics tend to be such that for currently active 
contributors, it roughly correlates with square root of commit count 
(which is an increasing function) and therefore isn't meaningfully 
different.

A similar thing was discovered in the N-papers-cited-N-times-each metric 
which was popular at one point in academia as an alternative to citation 
count. It turned out to maximize the area of an axis-bounded square when 
contributions were plotted, which is why for naturally occurring data it 
correlated pretty well with the square root of total citation count.

While this isn't an entirely analogous situation, most contributors who 
are active have been active since they started contributing, so this 
doesn't do a whole lot except to pick out people who used to be active 
and then stopped and then started up again.

- Leo Izen (Traneptora)